Well I would take a good guess and say he got that 18,000 from the 47 Million the author of this article got and then I would even say it was a LOW estimate of people who will die because of No insurance or Not enough insurance.
Come on Michael did a great job on this documentary Movie.
By the way GREAT post Michael.

By The Way… there is WAYYYYYYY more than 40 plus million uninsured in america. More than 50 percent of america lives in poverty…this population can utilize MEDICAID should they need it…so technically they ARE INSURED. The 40 plus million are MIDDLE CLASS people who are working without insurance or without enough insurance. And this mind you is in a nation so arrogant that it insists it is the RICHEST nation on the planet…Ha Ha Ha Ha… Is this wealth it claims to have take into consideration the 3 BILLION per day it gets from CHINA to remain financially afloat??? Don’t make me laugh.

The insurance companies are corrupt. We all know that. But they are only a small part of the health problem in the western world. Pharmaceutical firms, chemical firms, hospitals, medical appliance manufacturers - all of these, and the doctors themselves, have convinced us of their efficacy and made unto themselves a holy grail. Thou shalt not question whether what they’re doing is really effective. Thou shalt not question their methods. Thou shalt not ask of them that they keep track of the results of their procedures.

Even in countries like Canada and the UK, the reality is that the corporate world controls the system. It presents pseudo-science as documentation. It uses humans as guinea pigs - and then hides the bad results. The power of this system is stealing people’s control over their own bodies, preventing them from trying alternative methods of treatment.

This is the real problem. Remove the profit motive from every aspect of the system, and there will be no concerns about rationing of healthcare. The very assumption that the healthcare system itself is so good that it’s beyond inspection is the real issue.

Date Published: 2006-09-06

You’ve got to be lucky to make $4 Billion killing on a 6-month investment
of $124 Million

Larry Silverstein is the New York property tycoon who purchased the entire
WTC complex just 6 months prior to the 9/11 attacks. That was the first
time in its 33-year history the complex had EVER changed ownership.

Mr. Silverstein’s first order of business as the new owner was to change
the company responsible for the security of the complex. The new security
company he hired was Securacom (now Stratasec). George W. Bush’s brother,
Marvin Bush, was on its board of directors, and Marvin’s cousin, Wirt
Walker III, was its CEO. According to public records, not only did
Securacom provide electronic security for the World Trade Center, it also
covered Dulles International Airport and United Airlines — two key players
in the 9/11 attacks.

The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp.,
also linked for many years to the Bush family. KuwAm has been linked to
the Bush family financially since the Gulf War. One of its principals and
a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, Mishal Yousef Saud al Sabah, served
on the board of Stratesec.

Now, consider: The members of a small cabal owned the WTC complex,
controlled its electronic security, and also controlled the security not
only for one of the airlines whose aircraft were hijacked on 9/11, but the
airport from which they originated.

Another little “coincidence” — Mr. Silversten, who made a down-payment of
$124 million on this $3.2 billion complex, promptly insured it for $7
Billion. Not only that, he covered the complex against “terrorist attacks”.

Following the attacks, Silverstein filed TWO insurance claims for the
maximum amount of the policy ($7B), based on the two — in Silverstein’s
view — separate attacks. The insurance company, Swiss Re, paid Mr.
Silverstein $4.6 Billion — a princely return on a relatively paltry
investment of $124 million.

There’s more. You see, the World Trade Towers were not the real estate
plum we are led to believe. From an economic standpoint, the trade center
– subsidized since its inception by the NY Port Authority — has never
functioned, nor was it intended to function, unprotected in the
rough-and-tumble real estate marketplace. How could Silverstein Group have
been ignorant of this?

The towers required some $200 million in renovations and improvements,
most of which related to removal and replacement of building materials
declared to be health hazards in the years since the towers were built. It
was well-known by the city of New York that the WTC was an asbestos
bombshell. For years, the Port Authority treated the building like an
aging dinosaur, attempting on several occasions to get permits to demolish
the building for liability reasons, but being turned down due the known
asbestos problem. Further, it was well-known the only reason the building
was still standing until 9/11 was because it was too costly to disassemble
the twin towers floor by floor since the Port Authority was prohibited
legally from demolishing the buildings.

The projected cost to disassemble the towers: $15 Billion. Just the
scaffolding for the operation was estimated at $2.4 Billion!

In other words, the Twin Towers were condemned structures. How convenient
that an unexpected “terrorist” attack demolished the buildings completely.

WTC Building 7 was a part of the WTC complex, and covered under the same
insurance policy. This 47-storey steel-framed structure, which was NOT
struck by an aircraft, mysteriously collapsed 8 hours later that same day
into its own footprint at freefall speed — exactly in the manner of the
Twin Towers.

How could this have happened? Mr. Silverstein gave the world the answer
when he slipped up during a PBS television interview a year later, on
9/11/2002:

“I remember getting a call from the…er…fire department commander,
telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the
fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the
smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and
we watched the building collapse.”

As anyone who knows anything about construction can tell you, “Pull” is
common industry jargon for a controlled demolition.

One thing is for sure, the decision to ‘pull’ WTC 7 would have delighted
many people. Especially because it has been reported that thousands of
sensitive files relating to some of the biggest financial scams in history
— including Enron and WorldCom — were stored in the offices of some of
the building’s tenants:

US Secret Service
NSA
CIA
IRS
BATF
SEC
NAIC Securities
Salomon Smith Barney
American Express Bank International
Standard Chartered Bank
Provident Financial Management
ITT Hartford Insurance Group
Federal Home Loan Bank

The Securities and Exchange Commission has not quantified the number of
active cases in which substantial files were destroyed by the collapse of
WTC 7. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports
estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency’s major inquiry
into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial
public offerings during the high-tech boom. …”Ongoing investigations at
the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their
work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York’s Bernstein Litowitz
Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.”

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about
WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade
Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center. The bank says that
back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December
2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack.

Inside WTC 7 was the US Secret Service’s largest field office with more
than 200 employees. “All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in
all our cases, went down with the building,” according to US Secret
Service Special Agent David Curran.

What a neat, complete, and fortuitous turn of events was 9/11.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that one of Lucky Larry’s closest friends
— a person with whom it’s said he speaks almost daily by phone — is none
other than former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I would propose that instead of trying to nationalize industries Congress instead takes a firmer hand in regulating them. There is an obscene difference in pay ratio from a CEO to a labor employee. We should begin focusing on THAT fact. If that margin was narrowed significantly we would find much of our health care woes dissipating and would be more favorable to public aid going to pay for health care as it would encompass fewer people. And, as my doctor once pointed out - insurance IS one of the reasons that medical costs went up to begin with.

Remember, regulation and nationalization are two very different choices and considering our experiences with bureaucracy I would prefer clear cut laws or regulations regarding pay scales.